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Comment Re:Make it stop (Score 1) 72

And while mini nuclear reactors are a real thing, they are a fantastically dumb real thing.

I accidentally replied to another poster instead of you.

If you live in a western country, there's a decent chance a university near you has a small reactor, with students operating it. There's one just down the road from where I am now. It's been operating since 1959. I've been there. My father pushed the buttons back when he was a grad student.

Comment Re:Self-loathing Canucks (Score 1) 41

"Paying customers" is a pretty common differentiator. If you're in the land of the free it's pretty easy to get a pilot's license. It's quite a bit harder to get one that allows you to take paying customers... even if the paying customer is your buddy chipping in for gas. There are similarly different rules for the aircraft itself. Many motor vehicles too.

The GGPs view doesn't really have anything to do with that. They're probably okay with it because the people on the sub had more money than they do. Except the kid, but he's tainted by association I guess. None of them were oligarchs.

Stockton Rush's net worth was in the $10-20 million range and he famously dodged regulations rather than trying to wield political power to change them.

Nargeolet was a deep sea researcher whose main asset seems to have been his $1.5 million house.

Harding might have been a billionaire but nobody really knows. The most political things he seems to have done were some space advocacy in the UAE and volunteering a jet from his company to help fly some cheetahs to India.

Dawood's net worth seems to have been between $400-500 million. He did speak at the UN on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, was a trustee for one of King Charles' charities and was an advocate for mental health and education in Pakistan. Not really oligarch stuff.

Comment Re:Self-loathing Canucks (Score 2) 41

We canucks have this idea that irresponsible CEOs shouldn't be allowed to go around killing people. When part of the system fails we investigate, make recommendations, and try to fix it. That's not "self-loathing."

You know, if I could make a recommendation, you guys might want to consider trying it.

Comment Re:I don't think it would matter (Score 1) 41

What regulator has any experience inspecting a deep sea sub?

The biggest one:
https://www.dnv.com/services/m...

Regulation of this kind of stuff simply does not work.

Since you clearly don't know anything about how it works, I'm going to conclude that you know even less about whether it can work.

Comment Re:Make it stop (Score 1) 72

Lol. Ukraine isn't doing okay. The country is devastated and a big fraction of its younger people have been killed, seriously wounded or left. It's an especially ironic example because Ukraine had nukes and gave them up because both the US and Russia assured them they didn't need them.

Ukraine absofukkenlutely wants nukes. Whatever's left of it might settle for French ones, but there's a good chance when it recovers enough, which might take generations, it's going to want its own. Poland, next in line, also wants nukes. They were previously willing to settle for American ones, and might be content with French ones, but it would shock absolutely nobody if they built their own. Sweden too. Japan probably already has all the parts laid out neatly on a super secret table somewhere.

Comment Re:How much power do they make? (Score 1) 72

The "S" in SMR stands for small. A nuclear power station would almost always have a bunch of them. You could provide New York's 6 GW with a single big station, but you'd probably build a few smaller ones. Regular nuclear is the same. The electricity I'm using comes from a plant that provided 3 GW from 8 reactors. The distinguising feature of SMRs is that they're small enough to be built in a factory and shipped rather than built on site. That's it.

Also, New York City currently gets a lot of it's power from hydro dams in northern Quebec, and lots of the rest from Niagara Falls. There's no need to build the plants in the city.

Comment Re:In which 3rd world country can we store the was (Score 2, Informative) 72

"Intermediate level" waste doesn't mean much more than "not high level and not low level". Some of it is stuff that's a little hotter than the low level stuff and needs to be buried for 30 years. Some of it is stuff that's not very radioactive but will technically remain above background for 300 years. A wee bit of it is stuff that's also not very radioactive but will technically remain above background for a few thousand years.

"much of it" also doesn't mean anything. The vast majority is random stuff like clothes, concrete, tools, paper towels, etc. If your local hospital has a PET scanner or does radiation therapy it produces lots of this. All the syringes, gloves, linens, your bodily fluids are low level waste.

The high level stuff is the stuff people mean when they say "nuclear waste."

Comment Re:taxing unrealized gains is problematic (Score 1) 272

You know even rich people have to pay back their loans right? How do you suppose they do that?

The US seems to have a problem with a very complicated income tax code that's full of loopholes. It might be a good idea to fix that first. You could adjust the upper brackets so a billionaire spending a few tens of millions of regular old income just on maintenance, staffing and debt servicing of his super yacht or private jet pays a higher rate than a peasant bringing in a mere $630k pay cheque to put food on the table.

Oh, and quite spending a trillion dollars plus a year that you don't have warmongering.

Comment Re:Dictators (Score 3, Informative) 50

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

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